Crafts for Kids: Animal Mosaics

Randi from Swoon is with us today and is sharing a wonderful mosaic project that is not only good for developing fine motor skills, but serves and a great invitation to learning about the world of animals.

Do your kids love to cut and paste paper as much as mine do? I remembered a paper mosaic project I did in a college art class the other day and decided to modify it a bit for little hands. According to Wikipedia mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials.

You can modify this concept to be as easy or hard as you would like. I’ve included four simple animal shapes to fill in, but you could also use the same technique with a more complicated picture with several sections and colors.

You will need: Old magazines or pieces of colored paper, scissors, a template or a drawn shape to fill in, glue or glue stick, paint brush (optional)

1. Choose your colors and cut! Use scissors or a paper trimmer to cut small squares of similar color out of paper.You can use pages ripped from magazines or colored paper of your choice. Searching through magazines is more time consuming, but I love the dimension the varied squares add to the final product. Plus it’s a good time to talk about colors as you search! We chose blue, yellow, pink, black, and orange.

2. Glue your paper down. Working in small sections, apply glue to shape first and then carefully stick pieces of paper down, staying within the shape. A glue stick is easiest to work with for little hands. I used a bottle of glue and spread it with a paintbrush. Older children will be able to fill the shape with squares carefully enough to cover it completely and not go over the lines. You may need to trim a few pieces to fit within the shape. This process can be challenging for little ones, so it’s best to just let them have fun gluing squares wherever they want!

Click on the pictures below to download the corresponding template. My children really enjoyed this rainy day craft and I hope yours do as well!